Story
From Gardères to the rue du Bac
Joseph Laucaigne was born on 13 May 1838 at Gardères, a village of the diocese of Tarbes enclosed within the Basses-Pyrénées.His obituary in the archives of the Paris Foreign Missions describes his parents as simple peasants, "richer in the goods of heaven than in those of the earth."An uncle who was a priest, the Abbé Laucaigne, curate of Rabastens, gave him his first Latin and sent him to school at Ossun and then, in 1853, to the minor seminary of Saint-Pé, where he won the prize for excellence to the end of his studies.When a classmate congratulated him on his French oratory, he replied by asking whether it would be of any help in teaching the catechism to the children of Japan and China.
His wish to be a missionary went back to the age of ten, when he met the Abbé Tapie before his departure for Sichuan.After a single year at the major seminary he entered the seminary of the Missions Étrangères on 4 November 1859.Called to the priesthood in May 1862, he asked for a few months more: "I am not ready."A classmate remembered him as reserved to the point of shyness and never ruffled, and as so austere that he would go for several days without drinking even water.He was ordained on 20 December 1862.When his father took him to the station at Tarbes, his uncle asked him why he did not weep. "I have no more tears," his father answered. "Besides, I have given my son to God."
To Japan
The superior of the Japan mission, Father Girard, came to France asking for a missionary with tact and patience, and was given Laucaigne.Before leaving Europe the young priest went with Girard to Rome and knelt before Pope Pius IX, and he preferred to say Mass at the altar of the martyrs.He left for Japan on 16 March 1863 and reached Shanghai on 3 July.Japan's relations with the Western powers were then at their worst, and Girard left him in Shanghai while he went on alone.After two months he was called on to Yokohama, where he studied Japanese and English.
In the middle of November 1864 he was sent to , where he joined .He was twenty-six, small, with a sickly look and an apparent coldness that, his obituary says, hid an untiring zeal.Petitjean had built the church of the on the hill above the harbour, and the two men spent the following months in penance and prayer.Marnas, the historian of the mission, records that Laucaigne came to take the place at Petitjean's side of Father Furet, who had gone back to Europe.
The Discovery
On a group of villagers from made themselves known to Petitjean at as Christians.In the days that followed Laucaigne shared the work and the danger. Marnas tells how a family from Urakami, the mother Iwana (Jeanne) and her son Domingo, pressed him for explanations in the church even as officials walked in.When the young Domingo disappeared for three days, the two priests feared he had been arrested. On the following Monday he came back to the church leading his old father, who offered to take Laucaigne at nightfall by hidden paths to his house in a hamlet where only Christians lived. Laucaigne made no promise, but was deeply moved. "That is how divine Providence," he wrote to the seminary in Paris, "has made us find brothers in this Japan, where we thought that persecution had destroyed the last traces of Christianity."
He also organised the instruction. Four times a week, Marnas writes, the hall of the Immaculate Conception at Ōura was opened to a set number of children, young men and fathers of families, never more than twelve to fifteen at a time.On 10 May he wrote that "a single thought now occupies all souls, the thought of eternal salvation," and that some of the women of Urakami wished to consecrate themselves to God.
Mass by night
The obituary describes Laucaigne as the most zealous and devoted of Petitjean's helpers in the delicate work of reassuring the Christians without bringing persecution down on them.He visited the new secret parishes in the Urakami valley, Santa Clara, Our Lady of the Epiphany and St , where four thousand Christians had kept the faith of the old days, sometimes staying a week in one village to baptize, preach and hear confessions.He described his own life in a letter quoted in the obituary:
"When almost everyone was in bed and there was little movement in the streets, I took off my cassock, put on a Japanese robe that the Christians had made for me, a wig that was also a gift from one of them, and straw sandals, which in the mud last only one journey; a sash and a cloth round my head completed my costume."
Led by one or two young men with a lantern and everything needed for Mass, he went to the Christians. When he passed through Christian quarters, people came out of their houses or went into the fields by the road to kneel and make the sign of the cross as he went by: "that was their way of greeting the Father and asking his blessing."They prepared hiding places for him in the most remote parts of their houses; sometimes he set up his altar at the back of a barn that looked from outside like a shepherd's hut.He always celebrated in the middle of the night and finished before dawn. He did not go out by day for fear of being recognised; only at night did he visit the sick or change his lodging. "I hardly ever stayed more than a week in the same place. That is how a great part of my time was spent for nearly six months; they were the happiest moments of my life. May God soon allow me to begin again!"
Persecution and exile
In 1866 Petitjean was made bishop and vicar apostolic of Japan and chose Laucaigne as his pro-vicar.When Petitjean went to Rome in 1869 for the Vatican Council, he left him in charge of the mission.The persecution had begun in July 1867, when sixty-five Christians of the parish of Our Lady of the Epiphany were arrested. Laucaigne himself was nearly taken: he had arrived at one of the Urakami stations only the day before and was preparing to say Mass when a Christian ran to warn him, and he hid in the woods with a catechist all that day.Thousands were imprisoned or exiled, and several hundred died.On 25 February he wrote to his bishop: "I have nothing more to tell you about Nagasaki; there is nothing there but death and desert."
In 1870 the seminary itself was in danger. To keep for the Church of Japan the men its future depended on, Laucaigne took thirteen seminarians, a Japanese scholar to teach them the language, and five workmen to print books of Christian doctrine first to Shanghai and then to Hong Kong, where the prefect apostolic of Canton, Bishop Guillemin, lent them a house.There he fell ill with a "kind of brain fever" that for a long time took away his hearing, speech and memory and left his tongue and hands partly paralysed. All the students caught the fever and four of them died.In 1871 he returned to Nagasaki and took up his work again.
Bishop
He asked more than once to be relieved of administration so that he could prepare for death. Petitjean refused to lose "this untiring collaborator, this faithful counsellor, this devoted confidant," and proposed him for the episcopate.He was named bishop of Apollonia and auxiliary on 3 October 1873, and consecrated at Nagasaki on 22 February 1874.To his baptismal name Joseph he then added Marie. For his arms he took the cross of the Passion, with the motto Per signum crucis, and on his deathbed he explained why: to make reparation for the public outrage done to the instrument of our Redemption when Christians were forced to trample on it.
When the Christians came home in 1873 and an epidemic struck Urakami in 1874, the Japanese religious women who nursed the sick under were those whom Bishop Laucaigne had begun to direct, the community that became the "Lovers of the Cross."In 1876, when Japan was divided into two vicariates, he remained Petitjean's auxiliary in the south.After eleven months at the sanatorium in Hong Kong in 1879, he settled at Osaka, where, his obituary says, everything was still to be created.
"Per signum crucis"
In October 1884 Petitjean fell ill, and Laucaigne nursed him for nearly fifty days.After Petitjean's death on 7 October he became administrator of the mission.He fell ill himself soon afterwards. When asked whether he had prayed to be taken, he answered, "No, I have asked for nothing, I will ask for nothing: let God do with me what he wills."On 8 December he vowed publicly, at last, nine Masses in honour of the Immaculate Conception and every effort to build her a worthy sanctuary.On 17 January 1885 he asked for the prayers for the dying, begged pardon of all, and when told that the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus had begun, said, "So much the better, I am going to heaven for the feast of the Holy Name."He died at Osaka early in the morning of 18 or 19 January 1885 (see Disputed).His remains rest in the church at Osaka.
The obituary sums up his twenty-one years in Japan: he slept barely three hours a night, fasted almost every day, and gave to prayer all the time that work left him.